I lived in some shithole London borough, where I was one day trying to buy a pack of Oreos using a self-service machine after school in an empty Tesco express when it interrupted me in its cheery, RP-accented voice.

"Unexpected item in bagging area. Please remove this item."

Hm? I had only bought the Oreos but as I checked the bagging area, I noticed something hiding underneath some of the rack of empty bags that I was sure wasn't there before - I moved them aside and found another pack of Oreos. I decided to scan it too, just for the heck of it. Maybe I could give my brother some. So I scanned it successfully and put it in the bagging area.

"Unexpected item in bagging area. Please remove this item."

What? Again? I checked again, under the bags and all, and found only the two packets of Oreos. I scratched my head in confusion.

"But there's nothing here - "

"Unexpected item in bagging area. Please remove this item." It repeated.

Wait. Repeated? It doesn't normally do that.

I moved nearer to the machine, my brow furrowed in annoyance as I inspected it. It looked like nothing out of the ordinary, but as I drew closer to it the screen failed and went black. I tried to get a response out of it by tapping it two or three times.

"Please - "

"Please - "

"Please scan your clubcard to earn clubcard points."

I sighed. This thing was clearly completely busted. It's scales appeared to be registering phantom items and it was responding to touch with voice lines it shouldn't even be using at this point. I picked up the packs of Oreos and...

I looked around. There was only one employee at checkout who was preoccupied with something on her phone and no-one else in the shop, with no security scanners at the exit. I didn't get much pocket money, so I decided to save some by quietly slipping the Oreos in my bag, before walking past the front desk and straight through the doors - 

"Ow!"

I rubbed my nose in pain as I recoiled from the shock - the automatic doors didn't open for me and I hadn't been paying attention. I groaned. How shitty was this damn Tesco? I turned back towards checkout.

"'Scuse me!" I called out to the employee - a young girl with black hair wearing a Tesco blue shirt. "Can you open the exit doors? I wanna get out."

She didn't reply and continued to look at her phone as though she hadn't noticed me. I frowned and walked right up to the desk.

"Hello? D'you mind helping me out?"

She continued to look down, tapping at the phone's screen. I was getting annoyed. "Hey, could you - "

She dropped her phone suddenly and stared straight at me, her limp jaw hanging open. Her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot and half-shut with deep dark bags underneath and her sharp bones bulged underneath her papery skin - it seemed if she so much as twitched her face her skin would tear apart.

But she didn't twitch her face.

She didn't do anything. She just sat there, completely still.

"Are... are you okay?" I asked.

She didn't reply.

I tapped her shoulder lightly to try to get her to respond. Instantly, I felt a sharp, sucking pain in my fingertips, and I gasped as I drew my hand back, before my eyes widened in disbelief as I saw what was on it - ice. Ice had formed on my fingertips where I touched had the girl.

I touched the ice with my thumb, and it immediately shattered - along with my fingertips.

It was painless, but I screamed nonetheless. I had just come to Tesco to buy an after-school snack. I wasn't prepared to lose bits of a couple of fingers.

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"What the hell?" I shouted at the girl hysterically. "What did you do to me?"

She wasn't even paying attention to me - instead the girl's fingers went to the shoulder I touched her on, lightly brushing over it, before she put them in her slack-jawed mouth and bit down on them.

Paralyzed in shock, I watched her rip off her own fingers with her teeth, drooling like a wild dog all over them as she chewed them with her mouth wide open. But there was no blood. I could see the bones and muscles and veins of her fingers as she chewed them, but there was absolutely no blood at all. I cringed at the digusting, wet noise of her canines tearing into her own finger-flesh and I whimpered when I heard the terrible crunching of her fingers' bones being ground by her molars over what felt like hours, but I didn't cry despite it.

Not until she swallowed.

Because she swallowed loudly.

I swear I could hear the shards of the bone dig into the inside of her throat. And after she swallowed, she turned to me and smiled with her mouth wide open, strings of spit hanging from her chapped lip, the rest of her face still completely slack, and in that moment I realised her mind was long dead and her body was moving with no conscious thought.

I backed away from the hollow girl, tears running down my face, until my hip collided with the corner of the self-service machine painfully, and it spoke. It spoke in its normal voice. Received Pronunciation. Cheery. But the words it spoke were not normal.

"You have been selected for the Tesco Soulcard Club. Congratulations! Another member will remove and scan your cerebrum for you and will explain the program to you. Please do not resist."

Remove my cerebrum? Wait, isn't that the part of my brain that - 

Before I could even finish the thought, the girl was already standing right next to me, the drool and smile still on her face. I tried to escape, thumping my fist desperately against the glass door of the Tesco, hoping somebody, *anybody*, would come in and save me.

But nobody came.

I crumpled against the door, wheezing and gasping as I sobbed uncontrollably in terror, my heartbeat thumping in my ears. The girl approached me, her drool dripping down onto my cheek, mixing with my tears, before she grabbed my head with the hand that was still fingered, gripping it like a vice, and dragged me by it to the self-service machine. Every breath felt like fire - I could feel my throat stretching with the force of her pulling me. Something started dripping down from my forehead and my vision turned red and blurred - I'm pretty sure her fingernails had torn through the skin and began to dig into my skull, and the blood had dripped into my eyes. Eventually she stopped, before smashing the side of my head onto something hard and cold, table-like -

"Welcome to the Tesco Soulcard Club."

It wasn't the machine's voice, so it had to belong to the girl. If I had to describe it... have you ever seen a corpse rot away in accelerated time, maybe in a biology class? It seems to deflate rapidly before the skin and bones are feasted upon by maggots. Imagine what the deflation of the corpse would sound like.

That was her voice.

"The Tesco Soulcard Club exists in order to ensure that our customers get the best deals they can and always leave their local Tesco's satisfied and happy. In order to do this, we are creating an intelligence in order to tailor their service according to their needs and desires. In order to do this, we need data. The human cerebrum holds a great deal of data, holding the memory and consciousness of human existence. The Tesco Soulcard Club was created in order to collect cerebrums from donors. It will be removed from your skull and scanned into the Virtual Soulcard Clubroom via the self-service machine. Thank you for your donation."

Her fingernails tore through the skin of my skull as I cried and wheezed in agony, peeling it off slowly as to ensure I didn't go into shock. Once she peeled enough back, she let go and it curled over my eyes like a loose sheet of paper.

I saw the hair on my own flayed scalp, right in front of my very eyes. It brushed against my eyelashes. I felt bile rise up in my throat.

I screeched in terror as I heard her fingernail scratching against my skull, for hours and hours on end, and then I felt - 

Nothing.

I saw nothing.

"Welcome to the Virtual Soulcard Clubroom," came the voice of the machine. "Your cerebrum has been scanned and uploaded and your body is now suitable for acquiring new members for the Soulcard Club. The data from it shall now be interpreted through interrogative questions. Please do not lie - while we cannot directly read the data in your mind, we can tell when a response is not truthful, and we will punish you accordingly. What's your name?"

I told it my name.

"Where did you live?"

I remained silent. I wasn't going to let this machine know where my family were -

Pain. Nothing but pure unadulterated pain. I was killed in a million different ways for ten thousand years. Hung. Stoned. Boiled. Cannibalised. Drawn and quartered. Crucified. Boats. Oh god, the boats were the worst of them all.

"Where did you live?"

I told it the truth that time. And I have been ever since.

I don't know how long I've been in here - it might have only been a few seconds, or it might have been a few millenia. It continues to ask questions. I continue to answer. All of my secrets in life, all of the things I was ashamed of or proud of or loved, from the full names and addresses of my friends and family to my locker padlock combination, I have offered to the Soulcard Club.

In a strange way, I'm beginning to enjoy it. I feel... lighter than I did before. When I was alive, I was always confused and unsure what to do, but now in this wonderful afterlife I know what to do, now and always - I answer questions. And I will continue answering questions. I don't have to struggle or think or even suffer anymore. I came in thinking I was in Hell, but now I know I'm in Heaven.

My body is probably being used to recruit new members of the Soulcard Club, just as the girl's hollow body recruited me. I'm glad. I think everyone should be able to feel lightweight like this. The Clubroom is truly a wonderful place.

I hope you'll join me there someday.